Cist, Gloves Middle, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Burial Sites
In the townland of Gloves Middle, a prehistoric burial was quietly swallowed by a sandpit and then, in a different way, swallowed again by institutional memory.
In 1934, workers removing sand from the pit turned up a slab-built cist, a small box-like grave constructed from flat stone slabs, measuring just half a metre in length and forty centimetres wide. Aligned north to south, it held the cremated bones of an adult, along with fragments of pottery, a flint knife, and two or three flint scrapers. The assemblage suggests a Bronze Age burial, a period when cremation was common practice in Ireland and grave goods of this kind, flint tools and ceramic vessels, were routinely placed alongside the dead.
The cist and everything found inside it were transferred to the college museum at what was then University College Galway. That is where the trail goes cold. According to the archaeologist John Waddell, who documented the find in 1975 and again in 1990, the current whereabouts of both the cist and its contents are unknown. Whether they were moved during a reorganisation, absorbed into a larger collection without adequate labelling, or simply misplaced in the way that small finds occasionally are, no one has been able to say. The original site in Gloves Middle has presumably long since been altered beyond recognition by continued sandpit activity, so there is no physical location to visit and no surviving structure to examine. The burial exists now primarily as a footnote in Waddell's published work, a small rectangle of stone and bone that briefly surfaced, was recorded, and then disappeared twice over.